Announcements

"Yesterday Frank Karlitschek, maintainer of the openDesktop.org network, announced that first step of integration with openDesktop.org is complete. Effective immediately, developers can add their Build Service ID to projects on openDesktop.org, and all packages available from the openSUSE Build Service will automatically show up on the openDesktop.org pages.

"This is a great shared project between openSUSE, openDesktop, KDE and GNOME to make the life of Linux users easier," said Karlitschek. "People now have faster and more direct access to the latest software independently from distribution release cycles.""

Status Updates

Distribution

"Maybe you already know that vixie-cron is used as default cron in openSUSE. Currently there is no chance to push our ~20 patches to upstream (it's already dead), so my suggestion is : switch to cronie[1]. I prepared simple wiki[2] page about this step and also cronie package is waiting for testing in Base:System repo. So if you want test cronie, just add Base:System repo

Wiki / Communication / Events

"Since a lot of month the whole openSUSE Team is working on different things inside the Project. I’m very happy to spend time for the Project. The Boosters Team tried to make the Webpresence easyer. So they would like to give more Information in shorter Time. Since i’m working for open-slx as Community and Support Agent, i work with Rupert Horstkoetter on an special Range. In the last Meeting we spoken about our new Wiki QA, Templates and an new Wiki instance.

The Plan is, that we starting an new instance of wiki, and to there we importing the old wiki. We must proofread every time every Page, then we give this Page an new clothes (Templates). And then we importing this to an new Instance."

Tips and Tricks

For Desktop Users

"Now that you've learned your way around Vim, I wanted to focus the last piece in the series on extending Vim with scripts and plugins, and some other features that users should be aware of.

If you've been following this series so far, you know how to move around in Vim, setting up mappings and abbreviations, and configuring Vim and calling external commands. Now let's take a look at scripts, plugins, and the Vim GUI."

"Most Windows users know about the utility of the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys when dealing with an unresponsive application. A program is said to be unresponsive when it doesn’t respond to any user interaction and neither does it perform its intended actions. ..."

"Since I discovered just how great KDE 4 is a couple of months ago, I've been using it full-time and am loving it. In all that time, I've discovered a few tips and tricks that I couldn't live without, and all of them are listed here. Some of these include an inline CLI, split folders, setting up a media keyboard and using advanced wallpapers."

For Developers and Programmers

"The task scheduler is a key part of any operating system, and Linux® continues to evolve and innovate in this area. In kernel 2.6.23, the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) was introduced. This scheduler, instead of relying on run queues, uses a red-black tree implementation for task management. Explore the ideas behind CFS, its implementation, and advantages over the prior O(1) scheduler."

For System Administrators

"With all the talk of enhanced file system security and security frameworks, some of the basic file protection enhancements provided by the Linux kernel have been forgotten. While there is certainly a distinct place for security applications like SELinux, GrSecurity and others, there are simple means for securing files as well. ACLs and extended attributes for files are simple and easy to use, and can go a long way in securing files."

"What partition setup should you use when dual-booting Windows and Linux? Should you have a separate partition for /home? Why do some people put /boot into its own partition? These are the questions that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time (or thereabouts). This guide aims to answer some of those questions and demonstrate some partition schemes that may save you some space, hassle, or data loss down the line."

"Modern Linux distributions are capable of identifying a hardware component which is plugged into an already-running system. There are a lot of user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu, which will automatically run specific applications like Rhythmbox when a portable device like an iPod is plugged into the system.

Hotplugging (which is the word used to describe the process of inserting devices into a running system) is achieved in a Linux distribution by a combination of three components: Udev, HAL, and Dbus."

New/Updated Applications @ openSUSE

"I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 beta4 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page."

"I’m pleased to announce a new Version of our Package lynis. Now we have the Version 1.2.9. The Package is reachable in the openSUSE:Factory:Contrib Repository. This release adds several fixes and improvements for Squid, a few new tests, and improved logging and reporting."

Projects Corner

KDE Project

"Any avid followers of the weather wallpaper probably noticed that in KDE 4.3.80 the weather wallpaper configuration page sported an “Advanced…” button that opened up a dialog that looked something like this:

You may have also noticed, as attentive as you are, that the custom-wallpaper-for-different-weathers feature does not work. :(

The story behind that is that this summer right after trunk opened after KDE 4.3 I committed the initial code for that dialog and then went on a road trip with the family. I knew that the code had a few bugs in it, and it didn’t save the custom pairings at all, but figured I would get around to fixing it later. The trip was over in a week or two, but I found myself busy over the summer and fall with one thing or the other, and pretty soon it was KDE 4.4 beta time. Well, I wish I had gotten around to fixing it before KDE SC 4.3.80, but I didn’t and nothing can change that. The good news is that things should work reasonably better for KDE SC 4.4 beta 2."

GNOME Project

I likewise discovered Inconsolata not too long ago (it was packaged in Gentoo and I was really pleased to discover it also available in Debian), and have been using it as the constant-width font in Quill and Parchment for program listings in technical writing."

"Today we are making a few of announcements: Moonlight 2 is complete: Moonlight 2, our open source implementation of Silverlight 2 is done. An updated collaboration agreement between Microsoft and Novell to bring Silverlight 3 and 4 to open source Unix. Microsoft has an updated patent covenant that will covers third party distributions. Update: Sean Michael Kerner covers the announcement and talks to Brian Goldfarb from Microsoft."

Planet SUSE

"Easter eggs are fun. A special kind of them are winter easter eggs (do you still call this easter egg?). In the spirit of this tradition we added some snow to SUSE Studio last week. Now when booting a virtual appliance in SUSE Studio's testdrive today, the openSUSE boot screen was all snow with some penguins wandering around. What a splendid coincidence. I guess you can call this a virtual easter egg. Fun :-)"

"Spread out over a number of hours over the last few weeks I’ve been working on making our high-performance list view in Banshee also handle grid-style layouts. That is, all the benefits of our polished list widget with a new look and feel! I’m making the widget more clever and abstracted about layout and rendering so it can be more inviting to users. In fact, you can even live-toggle between layout modes (e.g list and grid) without losing any state."

"Break out the Champagne and get ready to celebrate the winners of the Web in 2009, and give a few shots to the losers. Looking back on 2009 on the Web, we saw some tectonic shifts in the market and major developments that are going to make 2010 very interesting indeed. Grab your tickets and we’ll see if you picked the winners for 2009, but if you bet heavy on Microsoft, you might be disappointed."

"If you follow my blog you’ll know that I’ve recently switched backed to KDE from GNOME, and I recently found a feature that I really have fallen in love with, when it comes to Dolphin usage.

The feature I will talk about today is Dolpin and Terminal Integration. First I must admit, I found this feature on accident as usually if I wanted to open a shell while in a directory to do certain tasks, I typically just did a “Shift+F4″, which opened a terminal of my current location. However, one time to my enjoyment I guess I didn’t press the “Shift” key, and went directly to “F4″. This brought up a new panel rightfully named Terminal."

"We are going to have to get familiar with Grub 2 now with some distros using it, so I plan to look out for these threads, to help keep everyone informed. Actually the issue here was interesting: The boot flag was getting switched. It will be interesting to see how this issue works out."

On the Web

Announcements

"The KDevelop team is proud to announce the seventh beta of KDevelop4. At the same time we're a bit sad as this beta also marks our drop-out of the KDE SC 4.4 release cycle. We feel that we didn't manage to get the needed features for the 4.4.0 release working properly and that we'll need a longer freeze period than what is available in the release cycle. We're now concentrating on getting the existing features shaped up and ready for release as well as fixing as many of the bugs as we can. No new features will be introduced into KDevelop anymore until the first release, which is currently aimed at end of March."

Reports

"Kernel versions 2.6.27.40, 2.6.27.41 and 2.6.31.7 offer minor improvements and correct several bugs – including one security hole. Torvalds has already incorporated more than 5,000 changes for Linux 2.6.33. Its merge window will probably be open for just over another week. Various developers are working on significant improvements to the open source Radeon graphics drivers."

"According to a recent posting from Philip Van Hoof, he suggests that Gnome split off from the GNU Project and proposes a vote. He has been informed he will need 5% of members to agree for there to be a vote put forth (10% is the real number). At the same time David Schlesinger (on the Gnome Advisory Board) has agreed on a vote."

"Linus Torvalds has merged the kernel code for the GeForce-compatible nouveau open source graphics driver as a staging driver into the Linux main development tree – from which kernel version 2.6.33 will emerge in around two and a half months. The 2.6.33 kernel should therefore support kernel-based mode setting on the bulk of Nvidia graphics chips (GPUs/graphics processing units) in addition to existing support for AMD and Intel chips."

Reviews and Essays

"Despite some downsizing in response to the fragile economic climate Novell have managed to keep up the pace of new development. The H Open spoke to openSUSE's Community Manager Joe Brockmeier for his views on the recent changes at Novell and his take on the future of openSUSE."

"Computerworld - At first glance, there's little to differentiate between the latest releases of the top Linux distributions: Red Hat's Fedora 12, Novell's openSUSE 11.2 and Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10. They each use the latest releases of open-source applications and are based on recent Linux kernels. Each of the distros also includes open-source applications such as OpenOffice and Firefox. However, a closer look reveals real differences -- in fact, each is meant for a different audience.

Underneath the hood, each of the three uses the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, but above that, their differences begin to surface. Fedora and Ubuntu, for example, use GNOME 2.28 (the latest version) for their default desktop, while openSUSE uses KDE 4.3.1."

"This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11.2 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, especially if you happen to live within a few miles of Alek Komarnitsky's house and the massive Christmas display he puts on every year in the name of charity. While most neighborhoods have a Christmas overachiever, Komarnitsky is in a special league of his own: His display can be remote-controlled and is powered by open source."

"Not all distros are made equal, particularly if you're a KDE user. KDE has had something of a rough time over the last couple of years. The transition from version 3.5 to 4.x hasn't been easy, and over this period many distributions have decided to use either Gnome or stick with KDE 3.5 as their default desktop.

But we feel KDE 4 has now matured to a point where most KDE users can safely dump their old desktop and move on to the new one. There are very few stability issues, and most of the functionality found in 3.5 has been migrated to 4.3. The question is, which Linux distro provides the best experience for KDE users?"

"During the past week I was able to look at a few more candidates in the Personal Financial Management area, and to gain some experience with the one that I have decided to use for now. Please keep in mind that what I am presenting here is intended only to give you an idea of what is available, with a very brief overview of each package, and give you a link that you can follow if you want to investigage further or try one of them yourself."

"For the past three years, Jono Bacon has worked as community manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest and most diverse projects in open source software. Consequently, when he recently published his thoughts on building and managing communities, people listen. More unusually, as I found out in a recent interview, when people like me critique his book, he listens, too, with a view to improving the second edition."

"There are a lot of desktop Linux distros out there that you can try for free. But have you ever wondered what it would be like to simply roll your own distro? Tech-savvy developers can do this fairly easily, but Joe and Jane Desktop User really couldn't—until now."

Warning!

"Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.6 and Firefox 3.0.16 to address multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code, cause a denial-of-service condition, operate with escalated privileges, or mislead users. These vulnerabilities may also affect SeaMonkey and Thunderbird."

The latest MozillaFirefox packages for openSUSE are available from mozilla repo in OBS.

"Adobe has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. By convincing a user to open a specially crafted PDF file, an attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code. Public reports currently indicate active exploitation of this vulnerability."

Localization

openSUSE for your ears

The openSUSE Weekly News are available as Livestream or Podcast in the German Language. You can hear it or download it on http://blog.radiotux.de/podcast .

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